Comment by brikym
3 hours ago
> If you want fresh strawberries, you can just go to a supermarket and buy them
Whut? It's a perfectly relatable example. Commercial fruit genetics are selected for shipping and shelf life. Nutrients and taste come way down the list of priorities. I've noticed the strawberries in my supermarket have a more consistent quality every year. Consistently awful. It seems like one company have taken over the market and the berries are hard and bland. But they look nice. As each layer of the chain consolidates it forces adjacent layers to consolidate and you end up with sameness. The small strawberry companies probably went bust because the big supermarkets pushed hard. Now I have to buy my strawberries from a roadside farmer and they're great.
In the Netherlands strawberries in the supermarket have generally good quality, and a season too, though you can buy them year-round. But there's only one type of strawberry, the red sweet ones.
A recent dopamine fracking example in the supermarket is beer culture. Couple years ago in NL small breweries were popping up everywhere and making delicious specialty varieties, or reviving long lost beers from old recipes. Also small shops emerged, collecting special beers from around the world. This did not go unnoticed at the supermarket, and the number of brands they offered exploded. Rows upon rows of the most fancy designer cans to attract your attention, highly priced but convenient. It killed off a large part of this trend. "Hey, I can just buy this in the supermarket".
If the corporate berries are really so bad, the invisible hand will push the company in the direction of society's aggregate wallet vote. Sounds like most people are fine with them. Outside of truly autocratic systems, sounds like these berries are WAI.